Boring, complex and important: a recipe for the web's dire future

'Data soul' of Shawn Buckles sells for £288

Dutch student Shawn Buckles has auctioned all his personal data to the highest bidder and earned a grand total of €350 (£288).

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In March, Buckles set up a website with an online bidding system in order to make a comment about privacy and the value of personal data. He put all of his personal data up for sale, including his personal records, location records, medical records, train travel patterns, personal calendar, emails, social media chats, consumer preferences, browser history and "his thoughts".

At the time, he told Wired.co.uk that he'd "rather decide" for himself who gets access to his data and for what reasons. "People don't seem to understand that privacy and autonomy are very much related and that privacy is a necessity for developing one's individual character and ethics," he said. Despite this, people are giving their data away for free by using services like Facebook and Google, and governments are misusing this data. "We're silently consenting to a surveillance state by making all this data available for free," he added.

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After a number of weeks and 53 bids, The Next Web has actually won Buckles' data soul with its offer of €350 (£288). According to Buckles, the company will use his data to illustrate the issue of privacy at TNW's forthcoming conference. The money will be donated to a Dutch digital rights organisation called Bits for Freedom.

To coincide with the announcement of the winning bid, Buckles has also written a pamphlet that outlines how "our right to privacy is at stake". It says: "Privacy is the right to live unobserved and undisturbed, and to decide for oneself what information one shares and with whom." "But privacy is gone. We gave it up, for no other reason but the thought that it's useless. Why don't we protect our rights? Our ancestors fought fiercely for them -- because they were oppressed."

The problem, he thinks, is that "we are children of peace", having lived without warfare on our home turf -- at least in most of the western world -- for almost three generations. This has lulled us into a false sense of security, he thinks.

If a dictator such as Hitler were to take power tomorrow, "he wouldn't only know our location, networks and beliefs, he could also pretty accurately predict our behavioural patterns and patterns of resistance". "To flee or hide would be impossible," he says. "Whether we have something to hide is defined by the context in which we live." You can read the full pamphlet online.

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Buckles told Wired.co.uk that "this is just the start". "If we really want a free internet, we will need to make a stance and show government and companies that we cherish our right to privacy." "I hope my auction helps people understand that the issue is about us, the people. I hope it helps to illustrate what data is being collected and how private this data is. I reckon our digital data says more about us than our living rooms. A question to you: do you have curtains?"

He added that a number of his friends blamed him for jeopardising their privacy -- by offering to sell email exchanges between him and them -- with some even saying they wouldn't send him any more emails. His initial reaction was: "Why this hypocrisy? everyone uses Google and Facebook", but then he said he realised that most people don't "comprehend the scale of it".